MKT 352 HW 1
An interesting phenomenon over the past few years is concerned with Juul, the e-cigarette
Silicon Valley startup company that launched in 2015. In the year following Juul’s launch, they
overtly marketed to teenagers and young adults, who are particularly susceptible to addiction.
They chose to not conventionally market and instead had a series of launch parties, where they
encouraged people to take photos and post them to various social medias. They featured images
of younger models on their website and social media with bright colors. The bulk of their
marketing was social media driven as well. They bought targeted ads on websites for children
and high schoolers, like coolmathgames.com and collegeconfidential.com.
Juul was motivated by a market segment that was not already taken by the larger tobacco
companies. They were targeting non-smokers despite their claims to want to transition adult
smokers to e-cigarettes. Initially, they had a different marketing campaign for adult smokers,
involving evolving technology for vaporizers, but instead chose to go with a different ad agency
for targeting the non-smoker market. While they were able to evade investigation for some time,
when teachers and principals started discovering Juuls in their schools they reported it, causing
Juul to face public health allegations as they grew larger. Currently, Juul has banned their fruit
flavored pods and age restrictions have gone up in several states to try and save the company’s
reputation. Juul’s competitors are other e-cigarette companies like ones that make disposable
flavored e-cigarettes, and globally, e-cigarettes are a popular alternative to smoking, however in
several countries flavored pods have not been banned, just in the United States.
Juul’s original initiative was extremely successful and caused the company to grow exponentially
over the past few years. The name ‘Juul’ was almost synonymous with vaping at one point, and
as mentioned earlier, their targeted ad campaigns worked very well to convert high schools and
some middle schoolers to a point where there were enough confiscations to raise awareness
about public health concerns. That was one of the major side effects/unintended consequences of
their campaigns, as Juul likely never intended to be in a major public health scandal involving
their products.
I thought this was interesting because I remember the popularity of Juul in both of the high
schools I went to, but never in middle school. I didn’t realize the extent of their campaigning
towards middle/high schoolers until I was in college. Juul didn’t become extremely popular until
2017-2018, which is when I was out of middle school but in high school. I also went to two
different high schools, one in Arizona, which was very large with a student population of 3000+
people and a rural private Vermont high school with a student population of 200 people
maximum. At both, Juul was very popular among all years and student frequently took the Juul
bathroom breaks that were mentioned in all of the articles. On top of that, when I was a freshman
in college, there was a viral video circulating of my middle school, where the principal had a
Lululemon bag full of confiscated e-cigarettes (mostly Juuls) and poured them out on the table.
Overall, it was an interesting topic because of how pervasive it was in daily school life.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/health/juul-vaping-lawsuit.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/juul-e-cig-startup-marketing-appealed-to-teens-2018-7
